“I want to see it in daylight,” I said.
“What?”
“I want to see the old tiles against the new, in daylight. So I can decide if this so-called artist matched them up right. My dad would’ve wanted me to make sure. Will you show me, tomorrow?”
“You mean it? You actually want to stay?”
I nodded. “I’m here. I’ll take your mom’s dare, for a while at least. I’m in if you are.”
“But you always picked Truth and I always picked Dare,” she said.
“I know. But say we did give it a try. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“You know whatever my mom has planned for us at the end of this, this...whatever this is...is going to be nuts. She hasn’t changed.”
“I still want to try it.”
“Why, though? It’s not so you can see what they did with your donations.”
I shrugged, touching the cold, thin line of new grout between the restored tiles. “Jett likes the fresh air. And I need to check on the house.”
“Right.” Casey took a deep breath. “I’ll try it for now. Whatevs, as Elle says. On one condition.”
“Okay.”
“You can’t ask me why I’m doing it.”
“You asked me why. Not exactly fair.”
“Your answer was bullshit.”
I nodded, slowly. “Okay.”
“We’ll see how it goes.”
“Anyway we’re already doing it. Your mom’s psychic. Listen to Clue 1:
“‘This little lacy room was not
True shelter from a storm
But the perfect place to shade yourselves
On summer days so warm
Bring me one square of blue, it’s the least you can do.’”
I tapped the mosaic. “We’re supposed to pry a tile off and bring it to her.”
“My mother’s such a delinquent.”
“Unlike you. Anyway I paid for it. We can borrow one tile.”
“What was that line about ‘monitoring our progress’? You think she’s watching from the bushes with night-vision goggles?”
“Bought at the Sharper Image with the Polaroid.”
We stared out at the dark.
“We know you’re out there,” Casey called.
No answer except from the frogs. Casey walked down the steps, rooted in the bushes, and came back with a stick. She knelt and dug at the grout, trying to dislodge a tile near the base. “This grout is way stronger than the old stuff. I’m not making a dent.”
I commanded Jett to sit, and after a minute she settled enough so I could split the flimsy ring of her collar with my fingernail and pull off the rabies tag. I handed the thin silver medallion to Casey. “Try this.”
While Casey scraped I scooted to the center of the gazebo where the light was brightest. I pulled the hundred-dollar bill from my pocket. “We could make her pay for dinner. She owes us that, at least.”
“But what about our gas and incidentals? Dare we risk not having enough funds for the incidentals?”
“I’m starving.”
“Me, too.”
“What are the options these days? Josefina’s Pizza or the Creekside?”
“They’ll be madhouses. Tourists up for the weekend.”
“The Greek place?”
“Became a Taco Empire four years ago, then closed for health violations. We could do the skating rink clue and eat at the snack bar. Kill two birds with one stone. Except.”
“The food? I can handle fluorescent orange nachos for dinner. It actually sounds fantastic.”
“No. The food’s not bad these days. But...”
“But what?”
Casey stopped scraping and glanced over her shoulder. “He owns it now.”
“Who?” I examined the hundred. It was a 2008. Someone had carefully outlined the triangle above the pyramid, the one holding the eye, with blue pen.
I studied the bill, reading Latin over and over (Annuit cœptis, Novus ordo seclorum), but I could tell by Casey’s silence that I hadn’t fooled her. I knew who He was. She knew I knew who He was. There was only one He in Coeur-de-Lune, for me.
And it wasn’t the He worshipped in my mother’s old church.
I looked up from the bill. “So he’s been here this whole time?”
“He has a house in Red Pine.”
“You’ve been there? To the rink?”
“Elle loves it. We have every birthday party there.”
“She’s a good skater, then?”
Casey turned back to work on the tile, speaking to the mosaic wall as she scraped. “Is that really the question you want to ask me right now?”
Hardly. I could think of a dozen that interested me more than little Elle’s aptitude for gliding around on eight wheels—Is he married? What does he look like? Does he have kids?
Does he ever talk about me?
Casey answered only the question I’d spoken aloud. “She’s a good skater.” She paused, but couldn’t resist adding, “J.B. helped me teach her.”
Jett whimpered. I’d wound her leash around my wrist so tight she couldn’t move.
“Finally!” Casey stood and held out the small blue tile triumphantly. “A little chipped in one corner but it’ll work.”
As we walked back to Casey’s house, she said, “You’re sure you’re up for the rink? You don’t want to work up to it?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Got it.”
“We’re all grown-ups.”
* * *
I drove us to the rink. If I’d been alone I would have done some serious primping in the rearview mirror first. Lip gloss, extra mascara. I would have taken my hair out of its twist and done a Level Three hair brushing, which required flipping my head upside down in pursuit of what my stylist called “volume at the crown.”
More than any of that, I wished I could try out reactions in the rearview mirror. Practice molding my face into various bland masks. Oh, hey, J.B., I’d say. Neutral, composed. Over it. A “no worries!” tone.
But I could only manage the lip gloss. I did it stealthily, transferring a dot to my finger, then my lips, while we were at a stoplight and Casey was calling Alex.
Casey put her phone on speaker. “Hey, it’s Alex! Sorry I missed you. Don’t take it personally.”
“Mom. You total sneak. We got your list, and we’re maybe going along with it. Maybe. But only so we can figure out how soon we need to check you into the asylum. So don’t think you’re not in trouble. Laura’s furious. I’m furious. Call.” A pause. “And don’t forget Elle’s multivitamins and calcium. One of the clear gummies and one of the opaque sugarcoated gummies a day. Goodbye, liar.”
I’d always envied the effortless way Casey talked to her mom, like they were girlfriends. Even when they were fighting, there was an easiness between them.
Casey sighed. “Elle worships her, naturally. It’s my mom who found her, at this place where she was volunteering.”
“An orphanage?”
“Tutoring center. She was born drug affected. But now she’s doing brilliantly. It’s the next turnoff.”
“I remember.”
* * *
Casey swung open the door to the Silver Skate ’n Lanes, unleashing a familiar mix of throbbing bass and arcade beeps. The rink smelled the same, too. Sweaty rental skates, overly sweet first perfumes, fake-butter popcorn.
“You’re sure about this?” she said.
“It’s no big deal. He wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”
Here’s where she was supposed to say, Of course he would, you look exactly the same. You look fabulous. But she was silent, walking ahead of me down the dark, carpeted hall to the counter. I lingered for a minute by the entrance, watching kids play with the gleaming metal mar
ble run on the wall. It was all in perfect order.
The middle-aged cashier smiled at Casey. “You skating? No Elle?”
“We’re just getting a snack, Deb.”
“Session’s over soon. No charge.” She taped glow-in-the-dark bracelets around our wrists. “Disco night, God help us.”
We pushed through the turnstile to the rink. “Disco Duck” was blasting. The smiles on the faces whipping by said, Yes, we’re doing this silly thing, but isn’t it glorious? The wind, the hundreds of tiny near misses, the satisfaction of a graceful turn, the soothing repetition of it. The rink was as effective as any monk’s meditation labyrinth.
“Let’s see that clue again,” Casey said.
We read silently by disco light:
Here you used to glide and spin
Young and swift and free
On hoofs of brown and orange you’d win
A game, a heart, a key
Visit the ancient chest of tin, take a picture to bring to me
“Is it the same one?” I looked around for the silver treasure chest. Automatically, illogically, because he would be forty now, I searched for another gleam of silver: a metallic uniform T-shirt, and The Boy with black hair who wore it.
“Still over there by the DJ. The prizes haven’t changed, either.”
The chest held the prizes you could pick if you won the Dice Game or the Shoot the Duck contest or did the most impressive Hokey Pokey. Someone in silver would glide out and hand you your prize ticket with a picture of Digby the Duck holding a key. Digby the Pirate Duck: the rink’s unloved mascot. Tickets were redeemed for something in the snack bar or for a cheap carnival treasure. Cockeyed stuffed animals, paddleball games whose tethers broke on the second whomp of the ball, plastic glitter bracelets.
Casey asked the DJ, a stocky man in a Jimmy Cliff T-shirt named Mel, if he would take a picture of us in front of the treasure chest. “Sure, Case, I’m on autopilot ’til the next block of requests,” he said, stepping down from his elevated booth. “You want to wear the pirate hats? Want me to get the giant Digby? He’s in the storeroom, but I can—”
“We’ll pass,” Casey said.
He opened the treasure chest and set us on either side, instructed us to put a hand on the lid. I’d stood in this exact spot with a group of girls at a birthday party once. Tina Kammerer’s eighth. Second grade. Tina in the pirate hat holding Digby, her mom shooting the photo. I’d just learned to skate backward, and I was beaming. That was all it took to make me happy.
Our photographer yelled something but all I could hear was “I will survive. Now go! Walk out the door!”
“What?” Casey shouted.
“I said, say, ‘Aaargggh!’”
I obediently mumbled, “Aar” behind my smile but Casey yelled, “Just take the damn picture, Mel. We’re not ten.”
He handed back the camera, the photo flapping out like a white tongue. “I was going to ask if you had requests, but not with that attitude.”
We waited in line at the snack bar, monitoring the image as it developed in Casey’s palm. It was overexposed, compromised by the flash bouncing off fake jewels in the treasure chest. Two women who might as well have been strangers, standing so carefully apart from each other, gingerly holding opposite corners of the treasure chest lid as if it contained uranium instead of ten-cent necklaces. My smile was tight and Casey was scowling.
If we were in the mood to write a caption in the wide white band at the bottom it would say this: What the hell are we doing here?
But I knew the white plastic would remain empty. That space was reserved for summing up happier shots.
“It’s a good one of you,” Casey said, examining the photo.
I prepared my automatic denials. I’m ten pounds heavier, I can’t wear my hair as long now, I have three lines on my forehead and a third of my left eyebrow simply vanished overnight... “Oh, please, I...”
“Stop. Can we not do that, please? Can we just agree not to do that?”
“Do what?”
“That thing some women do, looking for reassurance. That whole repetitive, tiresome thing. You look fantastic, and I look fine, and we’re thirty-five. Done.”
“Fine. So you think Alex is here? In a Farrah Fawcett wig?”
“Wouldn’t put it past her.”
We carried our burgers and Cokes to tables with little swinging chairs attached. Everyone ate while either pushing off from the table base and letting their chair return, over and over, or pivoting side to side. Even the adults did it; they just did it less vigorously. It was impossible not to. Casey was a side-to-sider and I was a pusher-offer. These chairs had probably absorbed a million man-hours of nervous energy over the decades.
“Have you seen your mom yet?” I pushed off from the table and returned, glad to have something to do with my legs. I tried to pretend I was looking for Alex, a lock of her red hair peeking out from under a blond, feathered wig. But I was looking for someone else. Someone tall, with shiny black hair and brown eyes.
Casey took pity on me. “He’s not here much. He owns a miniature golf course in Tahoe City and a couple other businesses.”
I gulped too much Coke and an avalanche of ice dislodged and fell down my chin. “That’s good,” I said, wiping my face. “I mean, good for him. He wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”
“You said that already.”
“I did?”
She waited a beat, fighting some impulse, and I wasn’t sure if she won or lost the fight but she said, so quietly I barely heard her over the music and games, the boom-clacks from the bowling alley, “He’d recognize you.”
We ate our burgers and watched the skaters, and in the long silence I wondered if Casey was thinking the same thing. That Alex had been right to give us activities. A schedule.
“They’re cute, right?” Casey said. “God, so young.”
“That one looks a little like your...” Daughter? Foster daughter? “Like Elle.” I nodded at a laughing girl skating past with long honey-brown hair.
“That’s her friend from school. Mia.” Casey waved, but the little girl didn’t notice. We watched her pack circle around. She was a bold and graceful skater, her hair flying behind her. She navigated the corners with a flick of her eyes and an imperceptible pivot of her skinny ankles.
The music stopped and a voice on the speakers announced the Dice Game. People had to stand by numbers spaced around the rink while a teenage employee rolled a fuzzy die the size of a washing machine. Anyone not standing under the number it landed on had to leave the rink. Finally, three boys at number seven prevailed, and they high-fived each other as if they’d won the lottery. Modern kids, supposedly so spoiled and warped by their video games and iPhones. Here they were excited about their trip to the plastic treasure chest.
“Why are you smiling?” Casey said.
“Was I? I was thinking I’m glad this place is still here. Swinging chairs. Digby the Pirate Duck. I’m glad it hasn’t changed.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“Me, too.”
The voice above me was older now, but unmistakable. I hooked my feet around the table leg to stop my chair from swinging.
J.B.
Also called The Boy Behind the Counter, and Skating Rink Boy.
For me, he was only, ever, The Boy. The boy who was different from all the rest. And now he was standing behind me, inches from the back of my chair.
“We’re a real time capsule,” the voice continued.
I looked up. He was leaning down over me, his black hair falling forward around his face. The only thought I could register was that even upside down and half-covered by hair, his brown eyes were kinder than any I’d ever seen.
And the only words I could manage were “It’s you.”
7
The Boy Behind the Counter
<
br /> June 1996
Summer before sophomore year
The last time I’d been to the Silver Skate ’n Lanes Pauline Knowland had shoved me.
It was in fifth grade, right when things started to go south for me at school.
“Watch out,” Pauline had said, in a tone wholly without fear or apology, seconds before her palms smacked the small of my back and sent me flying. I’d tried to slow down by dragging my orange toe stopper, a piece of cylindrical rubber like a giant pencil eraser. Instead I’d fallen facedown in front of the snack bar.
I hadn’t been back since.
Casey thought it was time for me to face my fears. The shabby skating rink/bowling alley in Red Pine had become cool again ever since Erin Simms threw a Roller Boogie–themed Sweet Sixteen. Now every girl in our class was talking about some college guy who worked there. He’d gone out back, behind the Dumpsters, with Debbie Finch. Debbie described this as if it were the most romantic thing in the world.
Alex was driving us to Red Pine so we could see what all the fuss was about. She clearly wanted to join us and dropped hints the whole way. “I’ve always been curious about bowling, do people really wear matching shirts like on TV?” Two miles down the road—“You two are so brave, I’d probably be a total klutz on skates.”
Never been bowling, never been skating. I added these to my list of facts about Alex. Didn’t know what a friendship bracelet was, never heard of the game Red Rover. These gaps in her childhood education didn’t surprise me anymore. Her parents had been strict, she’d said. Strict was always the word she used to describe them when I asked. Then she’d change the subject.
Casey was in the back seat, not speaking. I turned to her and raised my eyebrows, pleading silently. We have to invite her.
She shook her head. Casey was punishing Alex for something. But to me, even their rare fights were something to envy; they were the fights I imagined sisters had.
“She’s mad at me for turning a pair of her jeans into cutoffs,” Alex said. “I’m getting the silent treatment. You can wear anything in my closet, baby. You, too, Laur.”
I smiled, unsure what to say, and looked out the window.
“That’s a pretty song, what’s it called, Case?” Alex blasted the radio.
The Summer List Page 7